The Queen’s Speech sets out the Government’s plan for the year ahead, and the five-day debate that follows it is an opportunity for MPs to say what they think the priorities should be. I used my five minutes on Monday to stress the need for resilience - not just in defence and our critical national industries like food and energy, but also in our society itself. As I said, ‘the real foundation of national resilience and national security’ is ‘the security of our communities and families.’ I went on:
“How do we strengthen our communities and families? Communities need the plans outlined in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill in the Queen’s Speech: more devolution and more community power. I also want to see more reform of our public services to put them in the hands of local people, rather than have them as outposts of the central state. Families need more power and resources, too. We need more family-sized homes, including the affordable and social housing that has been announced.
“When it comes to childcare and social care, the answer does not lie in ever greater, larger provision, large-scale warehousing of children and the elderly, trying to arrange for the home and the family to do as little as possible. We must help people to live as they would prefer, to work closer to home and to have time for meaningful family life. We need people to be able to spend the money that is available for childcare and residential social care in the way that is best for them, to look after their children or their parents at home if they wish, or to pay for informal support among friends and family. To put it bluntly, it should not be possible to get Government money only if you put your dependants in an institution.”
You can read the whole speech here.
Also in Parliament this week I welcomed the award of £1.3m to Wiltshire Council from the Government’s Rural Mobility Fund, which Wiltshire are putting into improving bus services in the Pewsey Vale. Importantly, the money will be used to develop ‘demand responsive’ transport, namely buses that adapt to passengers’ travel needs rather than expecting people to conform to rigid and unsuitable timetables. Rural transport are the arteries of our towns and villages but at the moment buses don’t serve people properly. I think this new tech-enabled innovation will help.
A highlight of the week was the Mayor Making in Devizes Town Hall. Devizes has had a mayor continually since 1306, but the maces (one for the Mayor, one for the Lady Mayoress) date only to the 1640s and the outfits worn by the Town Clerk (wig and gown) and the mace-bearers (tails and breeches) were 18th century. The new Mayor, Councillor Peter Corbett, made a thoroughly modern speech about the priorities for his mayoral year, and outside the Ukraine flag still flies proudly from the pole. This town is confident enough of its antiquity to be entirely comfortable in the present.
If you don’t know Devizes, the upcoming Arts Festival is a good opportunity to explore the place. This continues the evolution of the old mediaeval garrison, then an early modern wool town, into a centre of culture. Chandler quotes a disgruntled local about 1750 complaining that ‘You have turn’d the grating of your woolcombs into the scraping of fiddles; the screeking loom into the tinckling harpsichord, and the thumping fulling mills into a glittering and contentious organ… Your market house (a stranger to woolpacks) is metamorphiz’d into a theatre for calls, and concertos, and oratorios’. Sounds OK to me. See details of the Arts Festival here.
